Chapter 9: Pictures

Several days followed with little interaction between us. Mom, I suspect, needed a little space and I was wary of approaching her after such an intense episode, given what had happened the last time. I decided to wait for a sign that she was approachable, no matter how hard that was for me to do.

We had gone through the weekend but I and the other serfs were laid off for a few days while the heavy equipment was moved to a new location. Mom sent me out to clean up Dad’s carpentry shop in the backyard, mostly, I think, to keep me out of her hair, top and bottom.

I knew Dad didn’t like anyone trespassing in his sacred shop, so I didn’t do much. I swept the floor and put some stuff away that wasn’t in obvious use for one of the several projects he had going on, but that was about it. In my general tidying, I came across a wooden box, obviously made by my father, lying atop our old kitchen cupboards mounted on the far wall of the shop. I stepped carefully down the ladder and placed the box on the large work-table in the center of the shop.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to open the box and if Dad hadn’t made me smaller versions as toys when I was a kid, I might have ended up simply putting it back unopened. But three simple pushes and pulls, sliding small pieces of embedded wood in or out, and the lid popped up. I eased the spring-loaded top open, wary of that it was some kind of trick box. It wasn’t, but I was still surprised, by the contents.

There were three bundles of pictures neatly laid out left to right, in the sequence of their dates, noted on the paper wrapped around them to protect the pictures from the elastic bands keeping them together. The pictures were dust free, safe inside the felt-lined cedar box.

I picked up the first bundle and freed it from its wrapping. I began looking at the pictures, careful to place them face down in the box in the original order. Knowing my father, he would know if a single picture was out of place.

They were all pictures of Grandma, about Mom’s age, and the resemblance to Mom was striking, given they weren’t related. Oh, you wouldn’t have mistaken them as relatives, but their hair was a similar color, something I didn’t know because Grandma’s had been gray as long as I remembered. What I did notice, and probably wouldn’t have a few months ago, was how much their figures were alike. If you exchanged bodies under the heads, you wouldn’t have noticed.

Both women, Mom now and Grandma in the pictures, had wonderful figures. Ample but not overly large breasts miraculously supported above surprisingly narrow waists atop flaring hips atop a pair of tapering legs that appeared long but weren’t because both Mom and Grandma were only about five foot four, tops. I would wager that both women were slender in their youth and grew into their sexually appealing bodies late in their twenties, well after childbirth.

Half a dozen pictures down, I found another similarity between Mom and Grandma. The only picture I had encountered so far with another person in the frame, my grandfather. I was surprised to see that he was eight to ten years older than Grandma, about the same difference between Mom and Dad’s ages.

I moved on, examining each photo and carefully turning them over onto the ‘seen’ pile. The pictures grew increasingly familiar and Grandma seemed happier and happier with the unseen photographer, which I assumed was my grandfather except for that one, which could have been a delayed photo; cameras did have that ability even back then.

More and more of the pictures featured Grandma facing away from the camera and focused on parts of her womanly assets that only a husband would have knowingly been permitted to take. There were pictures of Grandma in a pert, navy blue dress followed by pictures in the same dress, but the entire frame was filled with her hip and legs, prominently displayed as she sat on a stool from a side perspective to the camera. The next picture was the same except one hand was not present, holding the hem a few inches above Grandma’s left knee. Several more followed with the hand moving progressively higher until the hem was a far as it could go without pulling it over Grandma’s hip.

She had nice legs, the calf muscle of the leg in the foreground tensed as she rested her foot on the lowest rung of the stool, the pressure of her weight bulging her bare thigh out in the later pictures, above her white stocking and the last two revealing garter snaps that disappeared under her dress. I remembered the first time I had seen straps like that between Mom’s legs. As my cock stiffened, I pressed against the side of the heavy wooden table, pleased with the pressure exerted on my hardening member.

Well over a dozen photos followed with similar progression but in different skirts and dresses. Always, Grandma’s face wasn’t present in the revealing pictures. Then the theme changed to pictures of Grandma in a variety of different tops: full shirt blouses, tank tops, and sleeveless blouses. Again, Grandma’s face disappeared when the photos became more intimate, focusing on her chest, the gap between her lapels widening as the sequence progressed. The final photo in that series depicted no gap at all. Instead, Grandma was wearing a muscle t-shirt that was way too large for her, a fortunate thing for the viewer because her breasts bulged out the open sides and her nipples poked stiffly into the thin material which was woefully inadequate for hiding her womanly charms.

A muscle shirt. Grandpa wore a muscle shirt? That was hard to believe.

The last dozen pictures in the pile returned to the exposed leg theme but this time they were shot from a frontal perspective rather than from the side. Again, Grandma sat on a stool but both feet were now hooked on the lower rung and both legs were progressively exposed as the hems were pulled higher and higher, always by feminine hands that clearly belonged to the person wearing the dress. The photos cycled through various dresses and skirts but the final ones all featured a panty shot, the last one so close that I could see the woman’s bush underneath a set of pale blue, lacy panties.

Despite knowing this was my grandma, I ground my cock against the edge of the heavy wooden shop table and I could feel myself leaking in my shorts. This was so fucking hot! I would never have imagined, or believed, before seeing these pictures, that my grandmother was once a hot looking woman that let someone take such erotic photos. The photographer had to be a man, but who? Grandma was teasing someone with peeks at her bosom and panties. Would she do that for her husband? Possibly. But would Grandpa have a muscle shirt to loan her for that one picture? I highly doubted it. She must have been teasing a younger man.

Slowly, a ridiculous idea formed in my brain but I think I subconsciously rejected it even before I became conscious of the thought. But it returned, demanding to be addressed, to be formally rejected. Why would my father have kept a box of pictures of Grandma teasing a man that wasn’t his father? There was only one conclusion. The man was her son, my own father.

My mind reeled at the thought, recoiling in shock, despite the way I had teased Mom. I had just been fucking around then. The idea had just popped into my head for some reason I kept it up because it seemed to get Mom hot. My body had a different take. I exploded in my pants, and only then did I realize I had been grinding myself painfully against the table. Just then, Mom called out the back door. Lunch was ready.

Hurriedly, I flipped the stack over and bound it with the elastic. I knew my father had looked at these pictures recently, at least in the last few years, because the elastic was strong, not brittle with age, ready to break. I closed the box and carefully set it on top of the cupboards in the exact position it had previously lain, as demarcated by the dust around it.

I wasn’t able to return to view the rest of the pictures that day. Mom made me mow the lawn and take a load of yard waste to the dump. By the time I finished, Dad was home, and the shop was out of bounds.

There was no practice again that night.

The next day, I escaped to the shop as soon as I could, fetching the box and releasing its contents with a keen eye on the house in case Mom should wander back, though to my knowledge she had never been in Dad’s shop before.

I dragged the elastic off the second bundle. It was summer and the pictures started outside in my grandparents yard, the one I knew so well from being confined within it when I was little, free to run around, but only there. The pictures were taken in the backyard but to the right side of the house, the side that wasn’t overlooked by any windows, from my grandparent’s house or their neighbors. The front was screened by a trellis covered in a climbing vine that flowered in the summer. It was a private, shaded paradise.

Grandma sported colorful summer dresses in a couple of pictures which also featured Grandpa but those soon changed to short, white tennis dresses, tight white shorts, and eventually tattered jean shorts. The shorts pictures demonstrated something that the skirt photos hadn’t: Grandma had a tremendous ass. My cock was pressed into the table again.

The pictures always dropped Grandma’s face as the sequence progressed, inexorably moving to increasingly erotic views of Grandma’s legs. Each outfit started with a smiling Grandma striking various poses, then dropped to her legs bent this way and that, then featured Grandma lying on the grass in similar postures, even lifting her legs in the air, bent and closed, then open and straight. Each outfit ended with the same series of poses. Grandma on her tummy, legs together, followed by three or four photos of her legs moving wider apart. The last few, my favorites, showcased Grandma with legs spread wide, in short skirts, a narrow band of panties clearly visible between her legs, especially the last picture but one, so close I could almost count the hairs supposedly hidden by her white panties.

But the last picture in the pile, that one I laid to the side, pulling my pecker out of my shorts, frantically yanking my pud as I stared at it, my breathing ragged and out of control as I burned the image of this last photo into my brain. Grandma was wearing her white tennis outfit but her legs were tightly pressed together. Why was this one so hot? Because Grandma’s hips were lifted high off the grass while her head lay flat on the ground. Her short skirt was flipped over her hips onto her back and her butt was covered only partially by a skimpy pair of panties, the narrow band I’d seen in the previous photo. My eyes were initially drawn to the backs of her slender thighs and then much higher, to the stretch of her panties across her crack, halfway up her gorgeous ass. But it was the sight lower still that forced me to pull out my cock and stroke myself to orgasm. It was the darker colored patch framed by the triangle of her thighs and her ass, darker than the expanse of white above. Darker because it was soaking wet.

I came all over the floor. Mom was calling, for how long, I didn’t know. Lunch was ready.

“I’ll be right there,” I yelled, stuffing my cock back in my shorts and scrambling around for some shop towels to clean up my mess.

Mom was wearing a nice outfit with matching tank top and tight shorts that emphasized how lovely and still youthful her body was. I compared her to Grandma. I’d fuck either one of them in an instant, and so would every guy I knew. I couldn’t help getting hard again as Mom put a plate of sandwiches on the table and poured me a large glass of milk. I wondered if Mom knew about Dad’s stash. I munched half a sandwich before I worked up the courage to broach the topic with Mom. She seemed cheery and in a good mood. Maybe tonight was going to be a good one again.

“Mom, do we have any old pictures of Grandma and Grandpa?”

“Old pictures?” Mom’s eyes furrowed.

“Yeah. Ones I haven’t seen before.”

“No. You’ve seen all the pictures we have, many times, including the ones from their things after they passed away. You remember looking at them.”

It was a statement, not a question, but it was Mom’s diction that puzzled me, not her grammar.

“Yeah,” I acknowledged, “but there’s hardly any pictures of Grandma. I was just wondering if you or Dad had anymore lying around.”

Mom’s voice grew even more tense. “Why in the world would we hide pictures of your grandmother from you?”

“I didn’t mean hide them. I just think it’s weird that there are hardly any pictures of Grandma.”

Mom looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Well, your father didn’t like them around. That’s all,” Mom stated with finality, as if that was that.

“Why?” I persisted.

“I don’t know,” Mom snapped.

“Oh,” I said, acting as if I had accidentally tread on sacred ground. “I’ll ask Dad.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Mom exploded. “Don’t you dare,” she cried getting up.

I quickly leaned back, surprised by the vehemence of Mom’s reaction, a degree of discomfort signaling she was aware of the photos; that I expected. But this?

“Just leave things alone!” Mom snapped as she stomped by me and out of the kitchen.

Well, I thought, I guess there’s no practice tonight. And there wasn’t.

The next day, I hurried to Dad’s shop but not to look at pictures. Instead, I built a trellis to stretch from our house to our neighbor’s fence, hiding our back yard from the street. With the trellis in front and the shop far behind, the high fence down the side and no overlooking windows from either house, I had created a sanctuary similar to the one in the pictures of my grandparents old yard.

Why?

Because of the pictures I saw in the last pile the day before, right after Mom stomped out of the kitchen when I asked about pictures of Grandma. Did her startling reaction mean she knew about the pictures or was it that she didn’t want to be reminded about her second fiddle status to a woman long since gone? Surely, knowledge of the pictures would explain Mom’s reaction but so would a long haul knowing your husband had picked a wife like his mother, and letting her know that, however unintentionally, through a thousand minor slights over twenty years.

I needed to know. If Mom knew about the pictures, then her loose behavior with me might be part of a payback plan and her sudden trips beyond the pale were probably not so spontaneous as they appeared. On the other hand, if she didn’t know about the photos, then I needed to continue cultivating Mom, laying the seeds in which those surreal situations could bloom. I had been lucky more than once, or had I?

I worked hard all morning. Despite the noise of saws and hammers, Mom never came out to investigate, though I saw her in the kitchen window watching me carry stuff from the shop to the side of the house. At lunch, Mom was almost her normal self, just not cheery. She wore a flowered blouse made of a light, breezy material tied in a knot below her breasts, leaving her flat midriff bare. Below, she wore a pair of tan colored shorts made of a similarly light material, kind of like that quick-dry hiking stuff, that stretched tightly over her buttocks with a lift and separating effect that was more than flattering. Mom’s now tanned legs tapered down to a pair of cheap, summer flip-flops. She would have to be deaf, blind and dumb to be unaware of my silent appreciation as she washed the few dishes from lunch by hand instead of putting them in the dishwasher, perhaps to avoid sitting down to talk to me face to face.

“So, what are you building?” Mom asked, casually, as if she wasn’t really all that interested.

“Built,” I corrected her.

“Built, then,” Mom replied, her tone indicating she was keeping herself in check.

“A trellis.”

“A trellis? What for?”

“So you can plant a vine with some nice flowers that will block the view from the street. It’ll make that side of the yard really private so you can use it if you want to read outside in the sun.”

“Oh!” By the sound of her voice, Mom was very pleased. She twisted toward me, her face beaming. “That’s a great idea. What a wonderful thing to do. Where did you get that idea? You know your father will have a fit that you were in his shop, using his tools.”

“I just remembered that Grandpa and Grandma used to have something like that and I used to hide around there when I didn’t want to be found,” I explained.

Mom’s smile faded at the mention of my grandparents and she turned back to the sink.

“You just remembered it, did you?”

“Well, I found some old pictures in Dad’s shop. That’s why I was asking you about pictures of Grandma yesterday.”

There, I’d done it. I’d thrown it out there. I watched Mom carefully to see how she would react, bracing myself for a repeat of yesterday’s performance. But the volcano didn’t erupt. Instead, Mom just kept washing the glass she was working on, pushing a dishcloth inside and wringing it around and around. This glass was threatening to become the cleanest one in history, if it didn’t get worn out first. Finally, Mom spoke.

“Mmmmm, sorry about that, yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“You know, yelling at you and all that.”

“Sure. No problem, Mom.”

“I know your father had a bunch of strange pictures of his mother,” Mom explained. “He said she had nice legs and was quite proud of them so one day when she was complaining about getting old, he offered to take pictures of them so she could remember what they looked like when she was in a nursing home. Just teasing her, he told me, but she took him up on it and the next thing he knew he was taking zillions of pictures of her in every dress she owned. He just couldn’t bring himself to throw them away after she died. They were in her things. I don’t know why they upset me, but they did, and yesterday all that came back in a flash.”